Leading squash court manufacturer ASB has taken its
pioneering glass floor concept successfully into the world's
most popular sport, football.

Earlier
this month, Nike installed "the coolest football pitch
ever" on the roof top of the Bikini Mall in Berlin
for the finals of the German Nike Football X Cup and the
European Nike Football X Cup.

Furthermore, Nike used the event to demonstrate its brand
performance of the two Champions League finalists (FC
Barcelona and Juventus Turin) to launch the "Hypervenum X"
shoe - a new football trainer for small field competition on
performance surfaces.

The arena, custom-built for the three-day event, featured a
150 sq metre sports floor football pitch - equipped with an
LED screen over the entire surface.

The
10m x 15m pitch was created by sports floor specialists ASB
- incorporating the technology of the "ASB GlassFloor", the
state-of-the-art squash court floor recently launched by the
German company.

The unique floor featured more than 15 million LEDs - 10,000
per square metre. The ASB GlassFloor glass made it possible
to walk on the surface - the non reflective high-performance
glass equipped with a special cushioning layer and applied
to the top of the LED surface.

"The
result of the cutting-edge technology is breathtaking," said
ASB MD Christof Babinsky. "A pitch for small field
soccer that can be used as a screen across the whole of the
surface. The 'screen' was used to imitate several different
surfaces - like sand, grass, concrete, gravel and even outer
space. The score was displayed live on the floor and
different graphic animations in foul, goal or attempt
situations made the fast game even more exciting."

The Nike event attracted several stars, including German
World Cup hero Miroslav Klose and Brazilian's soccer legend
and two-times World Cup winner Ronaldo (Ronaldo Nazário de
Lima) - who both tested the pitch and picked three of the
players each to compete in a celebrity-studded tournament.

"The
event was a massive success," added Babinsky. "The feedback
we received from athletes was fantastic. All players had
been fascinated by the glass floor and the grip on the
glass. The matt surface made it possible to use the surface
as a competition surface even under direct sunlight, because
the players cannot get blinded by the reflection.

"We knew it would be cool, but even our expectations were
exceeded!

"The next step is to design the full LED floor as a modular
system that allows even faster installation or
de-installation. Install times are a key factor for events
of this type. With a modular system we can install a full
screen basketball floor that has three times the size of the
recent installation in only one day."

This
squash court development provide maximum flexibility for
sports centres, where walls can easily be moved either to
extend singles squash courts into doubles courts, or convert
a dedicated squash facility into an open arena for
multi-sport usage.

The new glassfloor development now offers additional
benefits - where the floor markings can instantly be
adjusted to suit the arena usage, thereby avoiding the
current situation where numerous different 'pitch layouts'
have to co-exist side-by-side.

A variety of sports in addition to squash - eg. badminton,
basketball, volleyball, handball, tennis or even boxing -
could benefit from this new cutting-edge technology.

"It would be great to see Klitschko on a glass floor,"
concluded Babinsky. "This technology is made for boxing!"